The Metaverse is actually the confluence of three things 1 - the same old tech dream of an ever exploitable augmented reality. you see this with chatrooms, second life, vr chat. 2 - facebook's decline and its history of just repackaging what someone else has recently created and marketing themselves into a dominant position. Meta is to, again, VR chat like instagram reels and so on 3 - the consolidation of media into far ranging IP oligarchies and the need to create a medium for cross pollination of everything under the sun. so you can be in a irtual coco chanel chatroom watching rick and morty, you bring up an in built shopping app to order a digital stranger things nike branded t shirt that you can wear to overwatch 3 later that night